


The New Custodians

by moreagaara



Series: The Emperor Revived [11]
Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Artificial Intelligence, Blood, Blood Magic, Cross-Post, Cross-Posted on deviantArt, Deviates From Canon, Emperor Revived, Fanfiction, Gap Filler, Gen, Genetic Engineering, Genetically Engineered Beings, Genetics, Literature, Medical Experimentation, Medical Procedures, Memories, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Originally Posted on deviantART, Reminiscing, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:41:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22344301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moreagaara/pseuds/moreagaara
Summary: This is a sequel to one of my own works in which I address how the custodians can continue to be made after the Emperor died, considering...well, I decided that they were made with blood magic and how can the Emperor blood magic if he's unconscious on the Throne...-trails off muttering-  Also, Vicky's back.Anyway, peep ownership.Games Workshop:  WH40k and relatedme:  the writing, the Emperor's name, and Vicky.
Series: The Emperor Revived [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1447444
Kudos: 5





	The New Custodians

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to one of my own works in which I address how the custodians can continue to be made after the Emperor died, considering...well, I decided that they were made with blood magic and how can the Emperor blood magic if he's unconscious on the Throne...-trails off muttering- Also, Vicky's back.
> 
> Anyway, peep ownership.  
> Games Workshop: WH40k and related  
> me: the writing, the Emperor's name, and Vicky.

Constantine did not frequently get time to himself between the demands of being the Captain-General—by sheer dint of being the oldest and best among the Custodes—and the demands of representing the interests of the Custodians (and therefore the Emperor, imprisoned as he was) to the Council of Terra. To have an entire Terran day—a whole twenty-four hours—to himself was unheard of. Yet somehow, he had managed it, mostly by way of pointing out his successor was ready to get some first-hand experience.

_Horus, how could you?_

Constantine would never get his answer, and neither would the Emperor. Even if the Emperor understood far more than Constantine did…granted the Emperor had lived for an almost inconceivably long time, even from Constantine’s perspective. Hopefully his much younger successor— _it should have been Ra, but Ra was gone_ —would be up to the challenge. Hopefully the remaining loyal Primarchs would be able to put aside their differences without the Emperor there to help.

Constantine found himself before the way into the Emperor’s secret laboratory, in an area so far removed from the public areas of the Palace, it might as well not exist. He allowed himself a small smile, then turned to see if he had been followed. Behind him, the empty stone hall—barren of light, life, and decoration—sighed echoes of dust and regret. Constantine was utterly alone. _On the one hand, that’s good,_ he thought to himself. _But on the other hand, Chaos proved it could break in through here. I’ll have a word with the others when I get back._

He turned back around to regard the entryway; here, the Emperor had placed a stone door, with carvings filled with metal. Twenty carvings, two scored out, surrounding the Emperor’s personal lightning-falcon sigil. Two obliterated carvings for the Primarchs the Emperor believed to be unrecoverable, the Primarchs whose rebirth had gone so disastrously wrong—so far as anyone could tell—that the Emperor wished to forget they’d ever been. Constantine placed his hand on the lightning-raptor sigil in the middle and hung his head. _We should have kept trying to find them, father. The insane dragon-beast…even if it shared your DNA, it might not have been your Vestral. And as for Hadik…it must have been a lie the planet presented you. I don’t know how, but they must have given you a fake head that only looked like his._

Constantine blinked when something stung his palm, and numbers flowed into his head. And how had he never noticed that keypad? Perhaps…he cautiously input the numbers that kept repeating in his skull, and drew his hand back when the door opened just enough to admit him. The moment he slipped inside, it slid shut behind him, but at least there was a handle on this side. He briefly examined his hand, and discovered a tiny scar in the center of his palm, directly over one of his veins. Constantine rubbed the spot, smiling slightly, then looked around.

It was as though Constantine had gone backwards by twenty thousand years in a single step. The cave-like apartment carved from the living stone of the Himalayas that had been the Emperor’s home from the middle of the third millennium up until the tail end of the twenty-ninth was exactly how Constantine remembered it, from the furniture all the way down to the still-active cleaning robot the Emperor had named Robin, who greeted Constantine with a cheerful beep. Nothing would do but for Constantine to kneel down and pat the flat disk-like robot on the top of its casing before he continued looking around.

The living room where he and the Emperor had played video games, with the oversized controllers they had managed to jerry-rig into most of the systems. The kitchen, with only non-perishable items left, since everything else had either been consumed or moved long ago when the Emperor had officially become an Emperor. The sparring arena with its sandy floor, and the grating in the entryway that would remove all sand from their feet as they stepped through, so they could not track it all over the rest of the house and make more work for Robin. The pool, which had eventually been partially converted to a hydroponics farm when the Emperor had gotten desperate from the lack of arable land on Terra.

Constantine entered and discovered the various crops—heavily genetically engineered by the Emperor to grow “stupidly huge stupidly fast”—had taken over the entire pool area. They also appeared to sense that someone had entered their room, and were uncertain of what to do about his presence. Another small smile, and a small laugh; the Emperor had somehow managed to breed a base level of intelligence into the plants without even meaning to. He carefully edged through the plants, taking care to not injure them, until he reached the climate control room for both the hydroponics lab and the pool; once there, he propped the door open, and watched as the plants visibly began to grow into the room and inspect the controls.

Once he had left, just as carefully as he had entered, he found himself near the sleeping suites. There were only four: the Emperor’s, Malcador’s, his own, and the nursery. Usually unused, except when the Emperor had gotten another foundling to create another Custodian, it had originally been Malcador’s. Constantine entered, trailing fingers on the door frame, which had been enlarged several times as the Emperor himself had gotten taller. Here too, everything was just as Constantine remembered it: from the wooden, white-painted cradle with its soft blankets of a material mankind no longer knew how to produce, to the closet with its multiple sections for rapidly growing boys, to the toy chest containing play-weapons. There was even a toy guardian spear for someone about as tall as a short, adult human. The rifle part even had toy bbs in it still, and it still worked just as well as it had when it had been Constantine’s to play with. He put it back down cautiously, even though there was little chance it would break, and left to check the other rooms.

Malcador’s room was open, but it usually had been, since he was always in and out. In the end, the only piece of furniture in there that was truly Malcador’s was the bed, which the Emperor would fold up and put away whenever he wasn’t there. As the Emperor had needed more Custodians, he had eventually moved Malcador and his bed into his own room, so he could fit three fully-grown Custodians into Malcador’s original room, along with an additional two in Constantine’s. Between the nursery and Malcador’s room, there was a crudely carved tunnel leading up to what had eventually become the Custodes’ barracks, but it had never really been a proper home.

Constantine sighed, glanced into his room to see that the additional beds were still there, along with the decorations his almost-brothers had placed over them, and along with the decorations Constantine himself had put above his own bed. In his case, mostly posters of music groups disbanded long before Constantine had even been born. _If a normal human were to come down here, they’d probably say this place was haunted,_ he thought, and respectfully left the Emperor’s chambers locked. He had always valued his privacy.

From the bedrooms, there was an unlit spiraling slope leading down into the labs; Constantine mentally twisted something, and a flashlight wired into his power armor clicked on. Now that he could see, he laid a hand on the wall, and carefully went down. Here, Constantine no longer felt like a visitor, but an unwelcome intruder. Even though the Emperor had never denied him access to the labs until after the Unification Wars and the premature termination of the Primarch project—in reality, the resurrection of his brothers, all of them tens of thousands of years dead by that point. The Emperor had never told the truth to anyone other than Malcador and Constantine; there had never been a time when the Primarchs were all together, and not doing something related to the Crusade, or the Imperium… _there had never been time,_ Constantine mused.

The door leading into the labs proper was heavily locked, and covered with lights and wires even a normal human would have had no trouble determining were linked to enough bombs to level the entire household, and probably the entire wing of the Palace built somewhere above it. Constantine didn’t dare approach; instead, he stayed back where he was fairly certain he could be seen. “Hi mum,” he murmured. There were whirring noises, and some of the lights moved to examine him more closely. “I’m alone.”

A female voice from nowhere answered him. “Hello Constantine,” Vicky said. “Where is Daenus?”

Constantine had to swallow a rant; even if only Vicky was here to see it, it would be improper for any Custodian, let alone their Captain-General, to shriek despair over what had happened. Of course Vicky didn’t know; she had to stay confined to the labs, for fear of anyone discovering and destroying her. “Dad is…unwell,” Constantine eventually managed. “Horus was…he got corrupted. And dad had to kill him, but not before he…” he trailed off, not wanting to think about the terrible injuries his father had suffered. The injuries that Constantine had not been able to prevent—that none of the Custodians had been able to prevent. The injuries that left the Emperor—Constantine’s father—crippled and comatose on the Golden Throne.

Occasionally, he would move. A finger would twitch, usually, or his head would shift slightly, or he’d take a slightly deeper breath than the Throne could give him. He never woke, probably never would again, and the times he moved were getting steadily less and less frequent. One day, probably very soon, he would stop moving altogether. Constantine wasn’t surprised to feel tears in his eyes, but he wiped them away before they could fall. “…he won’t be waking up. I wish I could smuggle you upstairs,” he told Vicky. “At the very least, you could keep him company.”

Vicky did not respond; Constantine knew from long experience that that meant she was just as upset as he was, but she had never been programmed to properly express sorrow. The company that had created her had believed that AIs should only feel positive emotions, and Malcador had needed to hack his way into her brain to give her the negative ones. Anger, fear, sorrow…Vicky had originally detested them all, until she learned their purpose. “…I’m sorry,” she said. It was all she could say. It was all anyone could say.

“The thing is…without dad, without him being able to use his magic…we can’t make new Custodians,” Constantine told her. “I know you’re…not exactly a fan of us, but…there are only a couple thousand of us left. It’s enough to protect the palace, if we pull double shifts.” Constantine himself hadn’t slept for a week, and was starting to feel the strain. “But it isn’t enough to protect all of Terra…and you’re the only one alive and awake who knows exactly how to make more of us.”

Once again there was silence. “The transformation from normal human to Custodian requires ten years and approximately fifty gallons of Daenus’s blood to complete,” Vicky informed him in her most clinical voice. Her problem-solving voice. Constantine smiled slightly, and took just enough time to marshal himself before he outlined the true scope of the problem.

“Since the Emperor is unconscious, he can only produce blood at the same rate a human can,” he said, forcing himself to be just as clinical and professional as Vicky. “However, his hearts are shutting down, and it is likely the Golden Throne will only keep one operational, since it is enough to sustain life.” Not enough to heal; no one could heal the Emperor save for the Emperor himself…or Malcador, who had died. No one else knew how to use blood magic to the necessary degree; not even Magnus the Red, even if he hadn’t gone Traitor.

For a moment, Vicky did not speak. “…my current calculations indicate that a Custodian may be created in one hundred years rather than a decade; it will require more of Daenus’s blood in totality, but less at any given time. Since Daenus’s blood does not store well, you will need to…take it from him as the process requires,” she answered. “I will take it upon myself to write programs that will mimic the processes Daenus originally used to imbue his blood with the necessary properties at various stages of transformation; you will need to keep them on separate machines.”

“If anyone asks, I’ll say we always used them,” Constantine told her; Vicky made her quiet beeping laugh.

“It’s even true, in a way…” she answered, then extended an arm to offer him the data chip with the programs she’d written within the few seconds between her saying she would make them and handing him the chip. “Will you come back, Constantine? Since Daenus no longer can?”

There was a lot riding on that request, and much of it was beyond Constantine’s control. And yet… “I’ll…I’ll try. I might have to stop being Captain-General, but I will try,” he answered eventually. Vicky gave him a grateful beep, and dimmed her lights; Constantine retreated upstairs, and once again patted Robin as he left. If he took the most direct route back to his official chambers, he could get six hours of sleep, and be up in time to get his second-in-command’s report of how their day had gone. 

~~*~~

The next day, Constantine called a meeting with those whose duty was to guard the Emperor’s body. Three hundred were capable of doing so, and should have been doing so; the Emperor had said it should be so, and had told them all of an ancient battle in which three hundred men had held off ten thousand. But with all the demands for Custodians to be everywhere at once, and with so few of them remaining, only one hundred stood in the Throne room. Constantine took a deep breath and began.

“Only your comrades—” and they knew he meant only the other two hundred of their number, “—may know what I am about to tell you.” There was silence as they waited for their Captain-General. “Yesterday, I entered the Emperor’s old laboratory, and recovered his notes on how to create a Custodian.” No one spoke; though Constantine had broken several of the Emperor’s edicts in going to the labs at all—let alone opening them and going inside—he had also saved the Custodes, if what he said was true.

Constantine still waited for the shock to wear off. “There are two ways of creating Custodians; the fast way requires the Emperor to be awake and takes ten years. The slow way, however, is still manageable, but will require a century.” He had taken the time to review Vicky’s method before coming to speak with the three hundred, and now outlined exactly what must be done to his brethren. There were nods, and a few were silent. Once Constantine was done speaking, one of the silent ones lifted his head and spoke.

“If the Emperor is constantly drained of blood to create new Custodians, he will not heal,” they said simply.

“The Emperor is unlikely to heal, even if we do not constantly drain his blood,” Constantine replied. “We have all seen him heal from injuries that would kill even one of us, but such healing requires an active mind to direct it.”

The silent one drew in a shaking breath. “There is no way to learn what he can do and heal him ourselves, then?”

Constantine had once asked the Emperor to learn blood magic, and repeated the Emperor’s answer to the hopeful Custodian. “Part of the screening process for becoming a Custodian is that we may have no psychic talents ourselves. Not only can we not use psychic power, but we can never learn how. If we were to try, we would die rather spectacularly,” he said. It was why they so often partnered with the Sisters of Silence, who could not be affected by magic and could prevent those around them from being affected by it. “While a normal human or space marine could learn these talents, the Emperor is the only one alive who knows exactly how this field works.”

“I see,” the silent one said. “…was there ever anyone else who could—”

“Malcador could have,” Constantine cut him off. This time, the silent one, and all those who were listening only nodded.

“You need only order us to do this, Captain,” one of the other Custodians said. Constantine gave a sideways nod.

“True, but I would rather you all understand why this must be done. Were any of us of the religious bent, I rather suspect you would be crying heresy at the idea, in any case,” Constantine joked, and was rewarded with some chuckles. “And in any case, someone will need to find children for us to raise.” Now the room was silent again. “This is…the only place in the Palace we can safely draw upon for that purpose.”

Ten Custodians stepped forward, including the one who had so questioned Constantine. He nodded at all of them. “Each of you should come back with two children. With luck, one of them will pass the screening.” Before they left, Constantine gave them each one vial of the Emperor’s blood and explained the initial test to them: one drop of the precious blood to a sample of the infant’s would do; if the sample turned black, they were to move on. If it was red, they could bring the child back.

~~*~~

Constantine stayed on as Captain-General until the first twenty children returned in the arms of the unarmored, cloaked Custodians; during this time, he ensured his second-in-command got as much experience as possible. Once the children arrived in a secret area carved out of living stone and hidden behind a tapestry in the Custodes’ new barracks—having come by secret ways only the Custodes knew—he officially stepped down as Captain-General and retreated into the laboratory he had set up.

There were other tests for the children to undergo, and none could be performed in the field like the blood test. Constantine nearly leaped for joy when two of the children passed the remaining tests; the others, the Custodes determined, would be raised as warriors until they reached puberty, at which point they would be tested once again to see if perhaps they could be space marines. If not, they would pressure the normal humans to find the children places in the Imperial Navy or Army.

It was only fair for taking the children away from their families.

 _If the Emperor ever wakes up, may he forgive me,_ Constantine thought. First, immortality; for this, they only needed a cup of the Emperor’s blood per child, and Constantine thanked the galaxy for that. Once run through the machine Vicky had designed and the Custodes had built according to her instructions, it could be mixed into the infants’ milk; after a year of exposure, they should be immortal and ageless, but Vicky’s instructions called for this to continue for two years. Just in case, and she had provided tests to see if it had taken hold.

Second, growth to the Custodes’ giant size. This too only required a little blood, and could begin after a month of exposure to the immortality-charged blood. This too could be mixed into the children’s milk, and they could simply drink it. Test after test could only hint that the growth had taken properly, so this would continue for ten years; the best test they had was a chart for the enhanced growth, and if the infant did not match it, they would have to end the exposure.

Once the infants could take solid food, they would get food laced with ceramite, so their bones could grow strong enough to match their brethren, and that much would continue for the rest of their lives. Theoretically, it only needed to continue until their bones had finished the majority of their growth, but Constantine could tell when his food didn’t have ceramite, and found it difficult to continue eating without it; most of the other Custodes felt the same way. This transformation, at least, was guaranteed success.

The worst change was, and had always been, the brain surgery. It was best done before the age of six, but could be done as late as ten. Without the Emperor there to heal the child, they would need to be placed in a bypass machine containing a full liter of the Emperor’s blood charged to heal nearly anything. Constantine’s hands were far too large, and he was no doctor, so the machine Vicky had designed came equipped with robotic arms Constantine could command or program. In case any of the Mechanicum found their way into this room—highly unlikely, unless his brethren failed spectacularly at their jobs—the program could not be saved into the machine itself, and would need to be put in fresh every single time. _Well enough,_ Constantine mused, _since every brain is different._

After the brain surgery, assuming the child lived through it—and fortunately, one of the two children did—Constantine immediately began the sensory augmentation that would allow the surviving child to experience the world so clearly that at times, normal humans seemed blind, deaf, and stupid to not immediately detect the things he could. He was inwardly thankful that one of the children had died during the brain surgery, since it meant he would not be stressing the Emperor’s supply of blood nearly as much; even so, the amount of blood necessary was astounding.

 _And we’re not even done,_ Constantine had weakly commented to himself at one point. Next came the secondary heart, and two different blood alterations. Another bypass machine, another full liter of the Emperor’s blood, just to keep the child alive for his secondary heart, and according to Vicky’s calculations, the child’s own entire blood supply would need to be drained and replaced with the Emperor’s over a twenty year period, and some of it would need to be charged to form the specialized scar tissue that gave the Custodians the ability to heal so quickly from nearly any wound.

And throughout the entire process, the child would need to be taught of loyalty. Loyalty to the Emperor, above all else, loyalty to the Imperium’s ideals after him. Loyalty to the other Custodians wasn’t necessary; that would come merely by dint of them all sharing the same ideals, sharing quarters, sharing a level of strength no one else in the entire galaxy could match… It was what the Emperor had done, originally; it meant that even the original Custodians after Constantine had not seen their older counterparts as brothers, but they all saw the Emperor as their father. It had been enough; it would still be enough. Constantine would see to it.

And since he was no longer Captain-General, he could keep his promise to Vicky while saving his kin. After one visit with her, and learning that the Emperor’s father was also a blood mage—and therefore capable of healing his son, and fixing everything—he quietly recommended the occasional mission to send an older Custodian out to try and find the Emperor’s father. One mission every millennium; those who returned never had any word of the fabled Crawyen Chakamar.

But the universe turned, and he came anyway.


End file.
